Letter: Weapon systems acquisition malady

By Carlton Melvin, Havelock

Published: Friday, April 5, 2013 at 11:42 AM.

It’s déjà vu “all over again” up at the Pentagon. They just keep getting better at the art of squandering billions on rosy and ill-conceived cost estimates for development of any given weapons system. One glaring case in point: the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter.

Here’s how it goes: Low cost estimates early-on suck Pentagon civilians and Congress into initiating funding. Development and manufacturing sites (pork) are set up in the anointed states to create jobs. Then, after the obligatory time, costs begin to very subtly rise above initial estimates. It happens every time. Per the GAO (Government Accounting Office), the estimated development and procurement costs for the F-
35 in
2001 was $233.3 billion. Fast forwarding to the present finds this number almost doubled at $400 billion; nearly a 100 percent cost overrun . In a mere 11 years. Not to speak of the total cost to fly the 2,443-plane family of complex variants for three services for 30 years, which has already exceeded the $1 trillion mark and is still going.

Even Pentagon officials acknowledge its lack of affordability. The undersecretary for acquisition just last year declared the F-35 procurement process to be “acquisition malpractice”. Man-hour estimates for unscheduled engine changes has ballooned . What sort of maintainability is that? Additionally, there appears to be serious pilot visibility (blind spot) issues. Overall, reliability and maintainability issues seem endless. Gross miscalculations up front combined with attempting to combine three different capabilities in one aircraft and then mismanaging it even beyond that sees the program currently still putting out fires when the buying process should already be finished.

So the high stakes game still goes on — the Pentagon civilians keep blessing the program because they have already invested taxpayer money to the tune of big bucks while Congress blindly pays the bills for fear that pork in their states will dry up. And don’t forget, the GAO does not investigate the Congress. And so it goes.

And to think that the old A-4 Skyhawk (the darling of many Navy/Marine attack pilots in the
Vietnam
conflict) was designed, built and the first XA4D flown in a mere two years following its conception on paper. And only three years later, in 1957, I personally flew an operational A4D-1 . Since then our procurement process seems to have gradually become one of dog-paddling in the proverbial “Vaseline pool”

The current, and seemingly accepted, acquisition process seems to be one of misrepresentation up front to get the funding started and then mismanaging it into a cost prohibitive red herring which, too often, ultimately evolves into the proverbial and expensive “tar baby” for the operator.

It’s déjà vu “all over again” up at the Pentagon. They just keep getting better at the art of squandering billions on rosy and ill-conceived cost estimates for development of any given weapons system. One glaring case in point: the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter.

Here’s how it goes: Low cost estimates early-on suck Pentagon civilians and Congress into initiating funding. Development and manufacturing sites (pork) are set up in the anointed states to create jobs. Then, after the obligatory time, costs begin to very subtly rise above initial estimates. It happens every time. Per the GAO (Government Accounting Office), the estimated development and procurement costs for the F-35 in 2001 was $233.3 billion. Fast forwarding to the present finds this number almost doubled at $400 billion; nearly a 100 percent cost overrun . In a mere 11 years. Not to speak of the total cost to fly the 2,443-plane family of complex variants for three services for 30 years, which has already exceeded the $1 trillion mark and is still going.

Even Pentagon officials acknowledge its lack of affordability. The undersecretary for acquisition just last year declared the F-35 procurement process to be “acquisition malpractice”. Man-hour estimates for unscheduled engine changes has ballooned . What sort of maintainability is that? Additionally, there appears to be serious pilot visibility (blind spot) issues. Overall, reliability and maintainability issues seem endless. Gross miscalculations up front combined with attempting to combine three different capabilities in one aircraft and then mismanaging it even beyond that sees the program currently still putting out fires when the buying process should already be finished.

So the high stakes game still goes on — the Pentagon civilians keep blessing the program because they have already invested taxpayer money to the tune of big bucks while Congress blindly pays the bills for fear that pork in their states will dry up. And don’t forget, the GAO does not investigate the Congress. And so it goes.

And to think that the old A-4 Skyhawk (the darling of many Navy/Marine attack pilots in the Vietnam conflict) was designed, built and the first XA4D flown in a mere two years following its conception on paper. And only three years later, in 1957, I personally flew an operational A4D-1 . Since then our procurement process seems to have gradually become one of dog-paddling in the proverbial “Vaseline pool”

The current, and seemingly accepted, acquisition process seems to be one of misrepresentation up front to get the funding started and then mismanaging it into a cost prohibitive red herring which, too often, ultimately evolves into the proverbial and expensive “tar baby” for the operator.

The entire acquisition process seems a prime candidate for major reconstructive surgery.